Ebook sales flattening?

Best selling author Nicholas Carr points to the first quarter 2013 sales data from the Association of American Publishers as a testimonial for flattening of ebook sales. Carr talked about the slower ebook sales in 2012 earlier in the year and offered up many arguments. While they might be true, I tend to agree with Matthew MacInnis, co-founder & CEO of San Francisco-based Inkling, a publishing platform company. He believes that while it has been great to repurpose the classic book format as ebooks, going forward the industry needs to think of ebooks from a different lens. Why not? After all in the age of tablets, shouldn’t we expect interactivity from cookbooks and textbooks that come with newer fun ways of combining knowledge and learning?

I’d say that simply many people who wanted some already have them. I bought a few, mostly education-type, because they are easier to carry around. But I’m not buying more ebooks, because.. You don’t get to buy them! They can disappear at any time, because of a licensing issue, or because the company ceases to exist. There’s no guarantee that you will be able to read them on any device in 10 years, and, as we all know, you children won’t inherit your collection. In other words, I “buy” ebooks when I must, and real books when I want.

people were staying away from buying ebooks since Apple looked liked it was gonna keep forcing other sellers to sell ebooks at a higher price. Steve Jobs did loved gouging customers even if they didn’t want anything to do with Apple.

Since Amazon smacked down of Apple, ebook prices will be reasonable again.

*Rate of growth* is slowing after growing exponentially for several years. Growth is not slowing. In order for rate of growth to keep up the same pace it would have to keep doubling, which isn’t realistic.

I like the idea of interactivity in some contexts like textbooks but for general reading I’m not quite sold. I think having interactive elements in a novel would be a bit jarring and disrupt the reading experience.